acadian fly!

    
     goody! just heard the unmistakable "PEETsa!" call of an acadian flycatcher.....he's hollering a good bit east of where he set up last year and the year before............and he's late.

     those of you who followed my 'acadiana nature notes' column that was published in the lafayette paper 1986-2008 will probably remember how i kept ya'll abreast of the ecological succession process here at our place in northeastern lafayette parish, la.....................for us, it all started back in 1982, as a cow pasture with a very lightly-wooded coulee (forested gully) running through it............today, it's a 28 year old bottomland hardwood forest with a mostly-closed canopy ranging 50-75' in height, full of hackberry, green ash, sweetgum, red swamp maple, water oak, live oak, pecan, persimmon, rough-leaf dogwood, plus others (red mulberry, white mulberry, cedar elm, american hornbeam, shagbark hickory, nutmeg hickory, durand oak, montezuma cypress, and more) that we installed ourselves.......it's a bona fide bottomland hardwood forest alright...........

     it was cool to watch which wild plants colonized the property first, how long they lasted, who came second, how long they dominated, and now, who came third (the climax species for this particular habitat type), and far along they have progressed.............................

     as cool if not cooler was observing which animals came in first, second, etc.....................because i know birds, it was especially exciting when uncommon stuff like ground dove (an early succession resident), fox sparrow (a secondary-succession winter resident), prothonotary warbler (a nesting species), kentucky warbler (ditto), and now, acadian flycatcher (a late-successional nesting species) trickled in.

     we got our first nesting kentucky warbler three springs ago, i believe..............this year, it was a month late, not arriving and setting up shop until this past mondary (24 may)...........i was getting bummed out......

     and two springs ago, we received our first nesting acadian flycatcher............whoa.............that definitely translates to "maturing canopy forest" conditions......................................but this past spring.......uh-oh.....we waited and we waited on it..................one or two birds showed up on the usual date (around the first week of may), but they moved on.....migrants i guess.....................then we waited and we waited some more......dam........i was starting to wonder what happened............then, today around noon: "PEETsa!"

     the acadian flycatcher belongs to a New World flycatcher genus (Empidonax) containing members that appear distressingly similar.............well, "distressingly" if you happen to be a person who wants to know what species he/she's looking at...............if you don't happen to care which is which, then you're cool.....just call it "an empid" and be done with it.............................anyway, in the field our 11 u.s. empidonax flycatcher species are identified mainly by voice............they all have different calls.........................the acadian fly is native to just about all of the eastern u.s. south of our northernmost tier of states.............so far as i know, i has never nesting or even migrated through the canadian maritimes; which, given its common name, is curious.................................unless they named it after acadiana ("new acadia, here in south-central louisiana), as it does nest in mature bottomland hardwood forests all around here...............i'll have to look into that......................................anyway, welcome home, little green dude............hope u catch a TON of flies..........

under a nearly-full moon

     woke up this morning at one-thirty-a.m......didn't have anything special on today's schedule, so i figured i'd go out on the back porch & check out the moon for awhile........it was shining like a spotlight; just a gnat's-breath past full. of all things, a yellow-billed cuckoo was croaking out its breeding song, off between our place and the crawfish pond to the north..........wow............never heard that one in the dead of night before. i've gotta say, it went particularly well as a duet with a nearby "cooing" screech owl............one or more screech owls have been "cooing" nightly for over a month now......

     fireflies have been very active nightly for over a month now; but this morning i only saw one, flickering up in the big green ash at the northeastern corner of the yard................then it hit me: why expend all the energy involved in lighting one's self up when one is competing with a full moon? hmmmm.........so that's probably it: the brighter the night sky, the less active the fireflies.......and, of course, vice-versa....................

     the screech owl songs and the fireflies have been most consoling over this past month........their presence hasn't exactly translated into an "everything's gonna be alright" type statement; nevertheless, they've made great natural companionship for a dude with a pining heart.

     at about eight-thirty this morning, a luna moth flitted an oh-so-short distance across the back porch....this was the very first time i've seen a luna moth on the wing..........at first, i took it for a tiger swallowtail butterfly; but no, 'twas a luna moth for sure........................................during daylight hours we most often see them perched in the deepest shade they can find, usually on the trunk of some large, heavily-canopied tree.

     this one flitted through a bright shaft of sunlight, awkwardly landing amongst the lower leaves of a nearby holly tree.................."darn," thought i, "you'll never make it thru the day there, my boy"................. checking up on him five-and-a-half hours later, i saw that he was gone..........hopefully duly warmed by the sun and then mobile enough to make his way to a safer perch.

     my handy-dandy 'peterson first guide' to caterpillars mentions that the luna moth "prefers hickories, but will also feed on other nut trees, willow, maple, sweetgum, persimmon, etc."...........we've got a lot of all of the above out here................yet, if i'm remembering right, this is the first luna moth that i've noticed here around the house........i'm thinking that lydia has reported them on several previous occasions, though. she gets around this property way more than i do, anyway.

     in my old nature column, "there's something new to see/experience every day that you look" was an oft-repeated phrase.........................................................................still true today, thanks be to God.

Oiled Again

     so here we stand, splattered in gooey oil -- and here also, the innocent ones lay; those plants and animals who lack the cleverness and resources to make it out of harm's way. sick, angry, and frustrated beyond measure, we point our fingers in outrage at the oil corporation responsible for the spill.....

     just playing devil's advocate for a bit here. are we certain that our fingers of blame are pointed in the right direction?

     should we suppose that any bp and transocean employee desired to work in an unsafe environment? any of us who've worked out there know that that cannot be true.

     if i've got my information correct, seven years ago bp and transocean co-presented a paper at a society for petroleum engineers conference in which they expressed concern that the failure rate of sub-sea blowout preventers in deepwater drilling operations was far too common of an occurence. bottom line: pressure to drill drill drill prevented them from allowing enough down time necessary to properly investigate and research the causes of these blowout preventer failures. instead, the rig hands were directed to simply replace the failed unit with a fresh one.

     put yourself on that tansocean rig for a minute. and again i ask, should we suppose that anyone on the operations end of these companies desired to work in an unsafe environment?

     so who gives the orders to drill drill drill? the company executives, who are in turn directed to do so by the corporate board of that company. Some refer to this little arrangement as corporate greed: the drive for short-term gain, fired not so much by any individual, but instead by a group of individuals whose sole goal is to maximize profits for....shareholders.

     aha. now it gets personal. shareholders. folks like, uh, you and me.

     by now, are any of you hollering, "not me! no sir! I don't own no shares in no stinkin' corporations? well, take a seat and hear me out.

     i'm gonna use myself and my household for an example here. like most u.s. families, lydia & i own two vehicles (a four cylinder and a 6 cylinder). we fill them up once a week. that's about 32 gallons of gasoline per week, or about 1,280 gallons per year. throw in a few more gallons of motor oil, transmission/brake fluid, etc. Now then, i'm sure some of you out there already know how many annual barrels of crude oil it takes to provide us with those products. and what about the 15,000 kilowatt hours of grid-supplied electricity that lydia and i use each year? in a 1,200 square-foot house? how much fossil fuel does that equate to?

     inside and outside our home, at least half of everything we own is petroleum-derived and/or petroleum fueled. our weedeater, riding mower, and push mower alone probably suck down a barrel of gasoline (55 gallons) each year.

     uh...seems like lydia and i have a bit of a petroleum habit, eh?

     here's another bottom line: it is our outrageous, unmitigated, way-over-the-top appetite -- DEMAND -- for petroleum products which drives the corporate boards to holler 'drill drill drill -- at any cost, damn it!'
 
     and gosh, i've even heard some national-level polititians taking up the same bannner. "DRILL DRILL DRILL!" they jubilantly declare.

     we wonder what's wrong with our government. it's broken and no one has any idea how to fix it.

     huh?

     are you tellin' me that you cannot see any way to fix a government whose lawmakers base a substantial portion of their decision-making on bribery? legal bribery?  does anyone suppose that the billions of dollars being poured into our, uh, governmental leaders' pockets (they would refer to them as "campaign chests") by the lobby industry would have no effect upon their judgement and decision-making whatsoever? and -- for cryin' out loud -- who allows this blatant, unjust, liason between business and government?

     we do.

     we demand petroleum products at a level that stupiefies the rest of the world. we support an overwhelmingly corporate climate -- personally, collectively, media-wise, etc etc -- which has succeeded in sinking its teeth into our very government. in some nations, it's the military that controls the government. we privately snicker at that, thinking, "how crude."  meanwhile, we in the u.s. allow the corporations of business and industry to toss our legislators into the bed, and holler "spread 'em, baby!" as a matter of routine, even convenience. you know? i mean, what a convenient way to stay in office. forget the nickles & dimes of your constituents at home. hell no, gimme the Big Money to float my campain armada.

     my beef is with neither corporations nor our democratic form of government. my beef is with the incidiously evil processes by which they are run.

     me & lydia gotta change. we've got to do better. i don't mean, change the world or anything. we've got to change our own ways. i'm going to look into solar power this year. we've already been talking about ressurecting our vegetable garden. we've got to stop or at least substantially mitigate the madness of "modern life," much of which we've been duped into perceiving as more convenient, more time-saving, more civilized, more sophisticated.

     we are not kings and queens. we don't possess an innate right to demand a superfluous life style. we are humans, living on this planet of riches, in the company of gorgeous, inspiring, and life-giving, fellow-creatures. we don't spout out the poetry of the self-entitled. we spout out thanksgiving for these riches, and a pledge to value them, consider their best interests, and to avoid deprioritizing their needs and safety in the blinding glint of short-term personal gain.

     thank-you God for this brand new day; and for another chance at doing it right.

summer

     yep.........summer's here for sure. "but wait," somebody says, "it ain't june 21 is it?"

     nope........it ain't june 21; not that june 21 has anything whatsoever to do with the first day of summer, at least not in my part of the world........to me, summer begins when the first locust sings; and that happened this morning (24 may)...........a lone locust, admittedly sounding kinda rusty, piped up from just behind lydia's wild yellow azalea there in the northwest corner of the backyard................umm-hunh...........yessir........summer's here.

     personally, i think (i'm gonna rant a little bit, here) it's pretty arrogant for some human to up and decide when the first day of summer is.........arrogant and stupid........and misinformed.........and certainly out-of-touch, y'know? like here's some weather dude or almanac dude or some committee thereof declaring, "yep let's put the first day of summer here, and.........what about spring? oh yeah.........uhm......spring can go here. uhm-hmm........yeah, perfect..........winter? oh yes, let's put it....etc etc etc.

     not long ago i remember spending the "first day of summer" up in western new york.........awesomely beautiful place...........trout lillies & mayapples blooming away (like they do in "spring" here in LA), mourning warblers singin'..................fresh new leaves on all the maples, hickories, oaks, etc (again, just like "spring" down here)...........and the weather? overcast and 50F..........all day. summer?? uhhhhh.......perhaps......for arrogant misinformed folk, anyway.

     ditto for denver........i was there on 21 june 1995.............cloudy and cold............even the birds were sitting tight that day..............no 'trah-la-la farethewell' business to be sure.........................

     i guess what i'm getting at is, more and more i'm noting the symptoms of a terminally arrogant, irreverent society, dictating stuff like when the seasons change. look out the window? what??!!???? step outside???? are you kiddin'?? naw..........just declare it, and it's a done deal............yul brenner in 'the king and i' : "SO LET IT BE SAID; SO LET IT BE DONE......."

   no no..............summer comes when summer comes.............rejoice, relax, let go, humanity...........summer'll let us know when it's here.

     is it really too late for us? has the chasm between humanity and Reality finally grown so wide that there's no turning back?  has the real world -- you know the one....aka "our life support system" -- finally been reduced to nothing more than an object for us humans to alternately rape and poison?

     presently, the majority of humanity fears contact with Nature. the only place where it's tolerated is on the television.

     back when i had just begun a career in environmental education, jim whelan gave me a book, 'spaceship earth,' or something to that effect...........it provided a sort of new groundwork for teaching environmental ed, at one point, it suggested this parable: imagine that the earth is actually a spaceship (and of course it really is one....a totally-sustainable, solar-powered spaceship, at that)...........imagine that we on the spaceship have somehow learned how to grow our food, create our breatheable air, and create and recycle our water. now imagine we catch a crew member or two poisoning this fine, shiny/new life support system we've created....

     what happens next? do we congratulate the perpertrators? buy their stock? allow them to become so powerful that they eventually control the ship by paying off the captain and his policy-makers, administrators,  etc.?

back in the saddle

whoa baby...............................after parting ways with my nature column (published in the sunday edition of the lafayette, la. newspaper 1986-2008) a coupla years ago, i've recently begun to miss writing about nature, particularly of the happenings around my place in northeastern lafayette parish, louisiana.....................wife lydia & i have been here on 50-acres of regenerating bottomland hardwood forest for the past 28 years..........we've watched this place grow from a cow pasture into a bona fide forest -- presently sporting a contiguous 70' canopy of hackberry, water oak, live oak, sweetgum, swamp red maple, green ash, and others............

i gotta go now; but please know that i'm back in the saddle, and exciting about the new possibilities afforded by blogger.com..................cain't wait to begin!

best blessings to all................